Warm glow from transactions

I spent a good deal of yesterday going through a download of last year's credit card transactions categorizing them, firstly so as to declare charitable and political donations (which we have gotten up to a reasonable 10% of income by fighting through and against deep-seated if ill-founded fears of reversal and penury) but also to get organized for tax season.

As I pawed through last year's transactions, certain of them brought back good memories. Above all, it was the ones I wasn't present for: Mary's trip to Alaska. Each time I saw one of those charges I got a warm feeling within, glad that she's able to get out and enjoy the world.

There were also good memories from a lot of trips I participated in, France, Spain, Alaska, the northeast, there were a lot of them. I could stand to travel less in 2024. Then again, I could stand to travel some. We'll see how it flows. Mostly I need to travel around NC to keep Trump and Robinson out of office. Job one.

Most superb of news

This morning I got confirmation that our next door neighbor Margot had gotten into medical school, which is fantastic. Both Margot and her sister Natalie are absolutely wonderful young people, but Margot had the mild misfortune of being slightly less of a rocket scientist on paper that her younger sister, graduating from Denison rather than Harvard, having to build a resume to get into med school instead of joining McKinsey straight out of college, etc. Margot has been around the neighborhood more the last couple of years, taking care of their house and dog while her parents spent a couple of years in Cincinnati on a career move they ultimately didn't embrace, so we've gotten to know her a little better. Fantastic news to put a cap on the year.

The whole ahnchilada

It is rather interesting that Mary and her siblings say "ahnchilada" like my mom does, like Mary Lee must have, like I used to before I studied Spanish, and like I probably still do if I'm tired and unattentive. This almost certainly derives from the fact that our moms had a glancing familiarity with French when Mexican cuisine first came to America and just figured that Spanish and French had similar pronunciation, or that they just kind of mapped French sounds onto Spanish words because each were "foreign". Entirely innocently, trying to pronounce new words as best they could. My generation carries it forward.

Christmas Eve in NC

Our first hosting of Christmas in NC for the Berridge clan gathers steam. Yesterday Rob and I played doubles with Z and Patrick, then I made a vegetarian enchilada pie for everyone before dashing to RDU to pick up Kevin. Today we will try to balance late young adult wakeups with Mary's very sensible desire for a walk in the woods at Brumley and the long time it takes to cook this enormous pork roast.

It appears I have neglected to tell the tale of the pork roast so let me lay it out here for posterity. In accord with her ongoing effort to have us eat less meat and also Rob's near vegan "flexetarianism" (he tries not to eat meat or cheese but will stoop to anything -- including eating meat -- to make sure food is not thrown away) -- Mary and Natalie decided that they would be making vegan and vegetarian galettes, respectively, while I would be permitted to make a "small pork roast." Pork because it has a lower carbon footprint than beef or lamb.

Unfortunately, by the time they decided this it was too late to order something from the fancy hipster butcher out at Saxapahaw. They had all this beautiful things like bacon-wrapped porchetta that were expensive but just right. On Friday I ended up in Carrboro -- I'll spare you that story for today -- and stopped into Weaver Street to get Mary her favorite breakfast bread (walnut raisin). Master foodie Chad has long sworn by Cliff's meat market, so I went over there (not without moving my car to avoid the parking Nazis currently roaming the Carr Mill parking lot to generate big commissions). 

Upon consultation, the guys in Cliff's told me that for a group of eight diners, a six- or seven-pound bone-in loin roast was just right. It was also the only one they had in the case and I didn't have the heart to tell them to cut it down into two pale shadows of itself. So I came home with the largest hunk of meat I have ever purchased, a far cry from the "small roast" that was authorized by our queen of the kitchen. I hid it deep in the meat drawer and then sprung it on Mary when she was in a good mood.

Turns out, Kevin has to fly back to NYC on Xmas day to see some of his people so he will miss Christmas dinner, and he was going to be one of my main carnivore allies at the table. So I am cooking it today. 

Oh yeah, I neglected to mention that, Tuesday or Wednesday evening, we all received instruction from Sadie and Natalie that there would be family PowerPoint night on Xmas eve. There was light grumbling in some quarters, primarily amongst those for whom PowerPoint (or the Google analog) presents a technical challenge. That's not me, but I have neglected to get my shit organized thus far and am not 100% certain what I will be presenting on. I'll figure it out.

Rivers of wealth

For some years now I've been reading Nick Murray's Around the Year, a daily reader for financial advisors and planners, in the morning when I'm at home. From his newsletter I know that he's to the right of me politically and I don't agree with him on everything about practice goals, equity allocations, etc, but he's generally a thoughtful guy and has been around and thinking about the role of the advisor for a long time, so he remains absolutely a solid read. If someone else would come up with another daily reader for advisors, I'd probably check that out.

Here in late December, Murray ruminates on the nature of wealth and postulates that wealth is something that transcends generations and allows families that have it to do good. It's true that lots of families with wealth do focus on giving to causes they believe in and that in the best cases philanthropy becomes a driving force within the family. But few of them really trim their living standards to give a ton away. And philanthropy can also evolve into a greenwashing myth that validates peoples' lifestyles.

We quickly get back to the questions of what is the best way for society as a whole to allocate funding between the effecting of public vs. private goods and how to balance economic dynamism and the desire to provide for one's own with making sure that everyone can live a decent life. Europeans always tout the relative lack of extreme human privation in their countries, but that is balanced by the fact that they don't make much of anything new that the rest of the world wants much of. Luxury goods and a pharmaceutical here or there are the obvious exception. Plus tourism

By now I'm oversimplifying dramatically because my work bell is ringing pretty loud. This always happens. One of these days I'm going to have to stop skirting around the edges of problems and write a book.

Reading more deeply

In a somewhat duplicitous move, I've turned off receiving the paper Journal while Rob is in town, out of respect for his deeply honed and entirely heartfelt environmentalism. Rob prefers e-books to physical books for environmental reasons, for instance.

Since I still don't want to turn on my computer first thing in the morning, I find myself reading more of the Economist with breakfast and coffee and therefore just reading more of it. This is probably an information consumption regime I should seriously consider.

But there is the problem of Monica, who delivers my newspaper each morning (though I never see her, not even at the recent show at the Cradle raising money for research for a cure for Glioblastoma, which took her sister Sarah from us all too early). I addition to Sarah, Monica also lost her brother Joe a couple of years ago and her mother passed this summer. Meanwhile her brother Dexter, to judge from his recent performance at the Cradle, is not conquering his own demons quickly.

We'll see what happens with the physical paper in 2024.    

Doubles vs Singles

We were supposed to play doubles again this afternoon but Rob is having some pain in his forearm so Z and I may end up playing singles, as per usual. But that would leave Patrick out, so Z suggested doubles, which may yet happen.

I am inclined to prefer singles because it is freer for me, in my mind. I've written about this before. In singles it's more me against myself (and, admittedly, my opponent). If I fuck up I don't mess anyone else up. It's rather like managing my own portfolio and financial life vs. helping others. Maybe this is part of the problem. Throughout the work day I feel responsible to others so it's nice to have that removed during my leisure.

But I do need to look at doubles as a growth opportunity and roll with it. Nobody really cares much, though they kind of do. Mostly people are out there for yuks. That's what I have to keep in mind.

Some very good people moving on

Yesterday the news broke that former UNC star Eric Montross had passed away after a relatively brief struggle with cancer. I was stunned. I knew he was sick, but had no idea he was that close, but that is how it should be because even though I am good friends with some people who are close to him and his family, nobody wants their cancer journey to be broadcast even semi-publicly.

Though I didn't know him well, every time I had ever seen him, whether in person or in video, he was doing something positive, usually raising money for some kind of cancer-related cause, whether Be Loud! Sophie or something else having to do with UNC's Lineberger Center. I spent more time on Facebook yesterday to see people's tributes to him, the best of which was Orange County Sherriff Charles Blackwood who shared about how Montross would come by his office when the Sherriff was out and move stuff around on his desk to mess with him. Good fun. But maybe the most moving was a picture of Montross near the bench with his arm around Coach Smith. It is hard sometimes to believe that Coach Smith has not been coach for over a quarter century and left us altogether about a decade ago. We are fortunate to have one of his players at the helm of the program now acting as lodestar.

Last week Liz Magill was defenestrated from her role as President of Penn after her admittedly suboptimal performance in Congress answering questions from Elyse Stefanik in too lawyerly a way. Liz was the first to pay for a few reasons: because her facial expressions were impolitic when she responded to questions posed specifically to elicit the answer she gave (answers very much on the advice of counsel); because Penn is dominated by Wharton and thus money; because photographers caught her at some very bad moments, and because she is blonde and blue-eyed and a Hillary Clinton proxy, easily sacrificeable. Liz was in my year in Branford College and was politically active from a young age and went out with (if memory serves correctly, and it may not) a guy named Bill from Arkansas. They were both a little too clean-scrubbed and positive for me, as my college years were kind of a dark time, so I didn't get to know her well. But I ran into her again in Princeton somewhere around 2004-2005 when she was doing a sabbatical from UVA at the Woodrow Wilson Center and we had lunch, then she brought her kids to our house for a play date. She is a lovely and excellent person and will go on to do further good things in the world. Admittedly, her ability to do great things at scale will be temporarily constrained by having fallen into the maw of the outrage machine, but such is life. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was acting on advice of counsel.

The joys of marriage

As has been my habit since the beginning of the pandemic, I gave myself a buzz this afternoon. I had been feeling a little fuzzy. Since it's chilly and will be even more so later this week, I decided that the "3" setting on my clippers was short enough for the back and sides, then finished up with a little free range, self-expressive scissor work on the top.

Towards the end of this period of manual snipping, I noticed that this cow-licky spot on the back of my head -- one that professionals have called out as a challenge -- looked a little bushy and figured I'd give it one more go with the clippers to see if I could bring it down a little. So I grabbed them, turned them on, and ran them over the area in question, only to see an implausibly large clump of hair drift downwards towards the bathroom floor. I gasped then looked at the clippers. I gasped again. There was no 3 attachment on them at all. No indeed. I had in fact run them bare backed over the back right of my head. When I looked in the mirror at the area, it looks somewhat like the head of someone in the early stages of recovering from chemo.

This, my friends, is where I am happy to be married, and happy that our large fundraiser is in the rearview, as indeed is pretty much all business development-related activity for fiscal 2023. I've got plenty of work to do in the next couple of weeks, but no sales. Yes, it is possible that my mom may notice and be vaguely scandalized at Christmas, but I doubt it. The light will be low and hair grows fast. Onwards.

Accepting dental situation

A couple of weeks ago I shared the story of the gums around my front lower incisors not so felicitous encounter with a plastic toothpick hidden inside a catered slider. Since then things have been getting slowly if steadily better. My bite has gone from feeling out of whack to back to normal. The pain has subsided except for in certain situations, for example when biting into crusty bread. So I had been largely avoiding those.

Then I had an appointment for a cleaning at the dentist. My hygienist, an excellent woman, took a closer look at the situation, got my read on it ("93% better"), shot an xray, looked closely around the tooth, then gently informed me of her opinion. "If I were you, given your amount of bone loss (from periodontitis), I'd be very careful biting into things that require you to tear, like apples or pizza crust." Her tone of voice implied that she was giving me general advice, not strictly limited to this specific tooth and its period of convalescence.

Which leaves me in the camp of more knife and forking, smaller bites, generally more circumspection, lest I fall into the permanent soft diet camp or even more expensive and tenuous dental interventions. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is not really on the menu here. I just have to make peace with the situation and roll with it. 

Fortunately, now it is lunchtime and I snapped up an intriguing new bowl from Trader Joe's, the chicken schwarma bowl. Let's see how this one goes.

Post game wrap up and transition

It's now Friday and Mary and I are largely recovered from hosting what turned out to be 113 people in our home Tuesday to raise money for Josh. We raised good money, though I feel like touting the exact figure -- if I even had it -- goes against norms.

Of course that night we were completely toast but we also went to sleep in a house that was 95% clean because that's just kind of the worker bees we are. On Wednesday I worked from home. Mary seemed to spend a good part of the day carefully scrutinizing the sun as it played across the wood floor at different angles. When she espied a stain of some sort, she pounced and broke out some combination of broom, wet Swiffer and vacuum cleaner and remediated the issue.

Partially it was because we were having one of our patented night after hoover up the leftovers get together. It was hard to rustle people up so close to the holidays but we eventually fed a few people and poured a little wine down the throat of a neighbor. 

But Mary was also, in typical but also necessary fashion, on to the next. Namely, Christmas, which kicks off this afternoon when Graham comes home. Then Mary's brother Rob arrives for two weeks on Sunday, then Natalie on Thursday, Beth, Sadie, and their dog Catfish on Saturday (they have an AirBnb to keep the dog away from our cats). 

It will be our first Christmas hosting, the first since both Mary Lee and George Jr left us, so it will be new territory.

Lost Girls, the wrap

I was all keyed up to write about something that someone had told me -- that it is illegal to ship books in France (to protect book stores from Amazon) -- but it turns out that what I was told is not true. The French did, however, recently institute a minimum 3 Euro shipping charge on orders of less than 35 Euros to protect booksellers. Which doesn't appear to have been particularly effective at protecting them outside of major cities, if Google Maps is to be believed.

So let me turn instead to Bob Kolker's Lost Girls, which I finished recently. It's a very solid book about a bunch of murders I had never heard of, the Gilgo Beach murders in which four clearly connected murders of prostitutes were unearthed after the disappearance and death, possibly directly connected but probably just etiologically twinned, of a fifth, Shannan Gilbert. Indeed, I just Googled the Gilgo Beach murders and found out that someone was recently arrested for them this summer.

Kolker does deep investigative work into the life arcs of all the murdered women as well as Shannan Gilbert and then tracks the course of the investigation while getting to know the people in the Long Island community near where they were found, as well as the online community of true crime gawkers and speculators who got sucked into the drama of it all. Which makes for a lot of dramatis personae, a lot of mothers (but few present fathers), grandmothers, siblings, children, and pimps/drivers/boyfriends. It became a lot like a Russian novel in that there were an overwhelming number of names of people to keep track of, particularly when I was reading in short chunks when tired before bed which made me feel guilty because so much care had gone into the research and writing but as a reader I was somewhat failing to individuate.

In the end it was brought home beautifully and humanely, albeit tragically. I won't say more. I cried. There is much to think about in this book about an America seemingly very far from my own, but just around the corner and available via the internet and a phone call. 

Game day!

After months of build up and coordination, in eight short hours we'll have a hundred-odd people streaming into our home to support Josh Stein's candidacy for governor. Thankfully I've arranged the day so my work responsibilities are light after a 10 am team meeting.

From here on out it will be a rolling process of checking off things on a task list while discovering ever finer bits of tuning as I go. The first thing I discovered is that we are a little bit short on toilet paper though we likely have enough. Mary thought she had bought some and then we discovered, in classic fashion, that it was in fact paper towels she had bought. We've all been there.

Later people will start arriving, first helpers and staff, then campaign team, then guests. Enough of this writing stuff. Andale.

A year in carbon

The odometer on my car just went over 96,000 miles, which reminded me that we had flipped 90,000 back in January when Mary and I were out at Lake Mattamuskeet. Given that my car is by far the biggest mileage vehicle in the family, that's not too bad. Mary's Prius (whom we call Beatrice) pretty much just goes to the store these days. The Subaru (AKA the "Marubaru") largely sits there while Graham is in school unless I am quite intentional about getting her out for exercise.

Admittedly, I'm cheating a little here. I probably put 1,250 miles on rental cars in Europe this summer. And maybe 300 on rental or borrowed cars in Alaska in June.

Then there was the flying. Europe, Alaska (though I did pause and stay in Seattle for extra days so as not to fly West twice), 4x to New York for George Jr's funeral, David Dennis' shiva, my 35th college reunion, and just business. Actually, the proximate motive of the last trip was to meet the children of a client with terminal cancer while she is still alive so that I wouldn't be just some random dude who is a trustee on their trust when she leaves us, so it was a pre-funereal exercise. Even on the Europe trip, I will give us credit for not just flying for four days but instead extending the trip to two weeks and vacation to be sure we made use of the carbon burnt.

I've also done a pretty good job dialing back the red meat. I really am at just about once a week and fairly often it just crosses my path at some kind of business event, which is to say I'm not consciously ordering it. Honestly I'd rather have less of that random red meat and more burgers I order at Al's or the like but such is life.

All in all, not too shabby. But tell that to the planet. Reading a pretty daunting survey in the Economist of the current state of carbon capture and storage technology and how woefully inadequate it is to the scale of the planet's problems.

Acceleration

Right about now, after a more than adequately busy fall, the year feels as if it is accelerating quickly. The fundraiser is fast upon us and there are a few more things that need to get done by then, followed by Mary's family coming in for the holidays. Meanwhile client questions and wrinkles are popping up left and right. It is hard to keep it all stable and solid to hold down the middle.

Which is where the virtue of my routine comes in. (Even as I type this, I hear that the neighbor's landscaper has fired up his leafblower, which is my signal to get it in gear and get to the office).

Staying on the topic, however, of acceleration, I should note that the Bible too accelerates a little as my reading of the New Testament progresses. I am now reading First Romans, Paul's first letter. We've had the four gospels and then Acts, in which the early church, primarily Paul, travels about spreading the Word amongst Jews but more notably Gentiles. In First Romans, Paul (it appears that the authorship here is not questioned) starts to abstract Christianity up into more of a general proposition, presumably based on thinking occasioned by a lot of wrangling and debating with others during his travels. He goes back to the Old Testament for precedents, but really he's at the beginnings of building a systematic theology on the basis of a lot of tales and stories. Moving from haggadah to halakhah, but in a more universalizing way. 

The moment of maximum pressure

Listening to the Acquired podcast about the history of Visa now, fascinating story both in its unfolding and its telling. But for a dork like me, the most compelling moment was the 1968 processing crisis for Visa's predecessor entity BankAmericard that brought all the issuing banks of the time together and ultimately gave rise to Visa. Back then, authentication of charges were done manually. If you were trying to charge something that was above the "floor limit" for the card, often $50, the salesperson would have to call the store's bank to check the customer's remaining credit limit. Then the store's bank would call the purchaser's bank and speak to a person there. It could take minutes. Obviously this constrained growth.

In 1968 all the banks that were using BankAmericard -- then a licensed product of Bank of America -- got together to talk through approaches in some boring place, maybe Columbus, Ohio. The solution that emerged (I'll spare you the details -- listen to the podcast) became Visa.

What's most intriguing here is that all this coincided precisely with the "paperwork crisis" on Wall Street which closed markets for months at a time and gave rise to an analog to Visa in the capital markets -- the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation -- much less a household name but similarly important in terms of providing a shared standard for data transmission and payment exchange for securities trades. Nb. and fun fact the DTCC was helmed by the father of a Larchmont neighbor of Mary's and the father of a friend of the Berridge family.   

It seems likely not entirely coincidental that all this came to a head in 1968, not just the great year of social upheaval in the streets of Chicago, Paris, and also the Mexico City Olympics but also the year the first cohort of Boomers turned 22 and headed out into the working world. There was just too much growth, too much commerce. It was also the year Intel spun out of Fairchild Semiconductor as the world began to spin up ever more computing power, which would be key to facilitating the liberation of commerce from the shackles of paper, with all its attendant goods and ills.

Dialing it in

Enjoyed the Gliobastoma show at the Cradle last night, for the most part. It was great to get out and see people and to watch some of my contemporaries revisit their respective youthful selves onstage. What Peggy Wants were great as usual, Ensslin remains the master performer, though he was a little more understated than recent incarnations and could, honestly, have used a little makeup. No matter, we cannot ask him to live out all of our dreams of disinhibition and full flight for us all the time.

The Popes were solid, the Bad Checks rocked hard and super tight. Snatches of Pink unfortunately fell victim to the temptation to live out years away from maximum amplification by turning their amps up to 14. Too much.

Then came Dexter. He has lost a lot, admittedly, in recent years. Not just Sara, but also quite close in time to her passing his brother Joe (of the band UV Prom, I think) died. Then sometime this year his mom did. His sister Monica fought her own battle with cancer, seemly doing OK now. She delivers my paper every day and it's nice to know it's her passing by, though I never see her.

But Dexter just came out on stage last night and pretty much winged it. It didn't seem like he'd been practicing much at all, or had a set list worked out or anything. Indeed, it might have been hard for him to practice, because not long ago Benson had been looking around on Facebook for a guitar for Dexter. Let's be clear here. Dexter is a genius, a genuine talent who has done amazing things in his life and has been consistent throughout all of it. I'll never forget the time he showed up in European History class and did a oral report on Denmark, and specifically a cultural trend that was huge in Denmark at the time: Rockabilly.

But just being a genius doesn't absolve you of doing the work. If you wants my time and attention, show up. Dexter last night was a few inches from Jack Whitebread (may he rest in peace) with a case of beer onstage at BeLoud! a few years back. You have to respect your audience and its time.

Blissful quiet

Tennis was cancelled because of rain this morning and Mary was out at the Extraordinary Ventures holiday sale hawking her book, so I came home to a blissfully peaceful home. I almost didn't know that to do with myself. In the end, of course, I read my book,.in which I've gotten a little bogged down. 

There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be done around the house and we have a flood of people coming in in a mere ten days. I suppose I'd really better go and do some of it now that Mary's gotten home. I always feel better having done so, even if the doing of it is drudgerous.

My tooth seems to be improving with time, though it's still a little off. I keep thinking back to the example of Mary Lee's best friend from college, who had lost her sense of taste some years before I last saw her and kept a sense of optimism about her. The worst case scenario is I loose the tooth and either get it replaced or learn to work around it.